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Baptist Offspring, Southern Midwife--Jesse Mercer''s Cluster of Spiritual Songs (1810): A Study in American Hymnody. .(Book Review)-

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Baptist Offspring, Southern Midwife--Jesse Mercer's Cluster of Spiritual Songs (1810): A Study in American Hymnody. By Kay Norton. (Detroit Monographs in Musicology/Studies in Music, 34.) Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 2002. [xxiii, 202 p. ISBN 0899-90109-3. $47.50.] Music examples, illustrations, maps, tables, bibliography, indexes.

Jesse Mercer's hymnal The Cluster of Spiritual Songs was the most important hymn collection in the lower South from 1800 to 1835. Through its longevity--it passed through eleven editions--and its combination of classic English Evangelical hymns with rough-hewn American spiritual ballads and revival songs, Mercer's Cluster became a classic of southern hymnody in the early republic. In Baptist Offspring, Southern Midwife, Kay Norton offers an important new interpretation of this historic hymnal. While retaining standard hymnological inquiries into biographical, bibliographical, and literary matters, Norton sets those interests in a much wider context that also includes race, class, gender, religious and regional history, and musical resources. By her construction and pursuit of this ambitious agenda, Norton provides a reading that significantly advances the study of this complex religious, musical, and cultural text.

Mercer (1769-1841), a nationally known Baptist elder from Powelton, Georgia, published the first edition of The Cluster around 1800 as a collection of roughly 150 hymns and added a small supplement to the 1804 edition. No copies of these first two editions have survived. Mercer appended another supplement in 1810, bringing the total number of hymns in the third edition to 199. The hymnal's success encouraged Mercer...

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